This weekend, two prominent members of the CS:GO community, Trevor "Tmartn" Martin and Tom "Syndicate" Cassel, with a combined 10 million YouTube subscribers, found themselves in the eye of a storm surrounding CS:GO Lotto, a Counter-Strike gambling site that lets players as young as 13 win big money from gun skin-trading.

After months of speculation and a lengthy investigation by H3H3 productions, Martin and Cassel were forced to admit that they were part-owners of CS:GO Lotto, a gambling site they frequently promoted on their own channels without disclosing they had a financial stake in it. Since the controversy broke, at least one more community member, Josh “JoshOG” Beaver also revealed he had an equity interest in the site.

What has followed in the past few days has been a series of gambling videos set to private, videos modified with after-the-fact disclosure reveals and deleted tweets explaining what happened. One from Martin reads:

“I've admitted to wishing I was more upfront about owning the site. It was always public info but I was never very outspoken about it. My idea was to keep business business, while the focus of YouTube was simply making entertaining content. Obviously that was misleading to viewers and something I very much regret. I've never been perfect and I 100% own up to that mistake....That being said, everything we've done up until this point has been legal, that has been a #1 priority of ours. The day it becomes illegal is the day we cease activity.”

The argument made by Martin and Cassel is that they never kept their involvement with CS:GO Lotto a secret, they just didn’t publicize it. Unfortunately, that may not be good enough for the FTC, which requires conspicuous disclosure on digital advertising, which clearly was not the case in Martin and Cassel’s videos which show them winning big and encouraging their (often very young) followers to gamble using the site as well. Another aspect of this is that many are accusing Cassel and Martin of rigging their own site to show them winning big, implying that their audiences could do the same. At least one YouTuber, Lewis “PsiSyndicate” Stewart, has come forward and admitted that two of his “big win” videos with 1.5 million total views were in fact rigged, and he was paid to promote the skin-gambling site. This is the reason you see the legally mandated “results not typical” disclaimer on ads for betting sites like DraftKings or FanDuel, a disclaimer these videos lacked, along with disclosure.

To outsiders, it can be a little hard to understand what’s even being gambled here. Briefly, here’s why sites like CS:GO Lotto and SteamLotto can dodge traditional gambling regulations.

Players buy a weapon skin for $2.50, a skin which itself has no monetary value. Rather, the value is set by the community based on how rare the skin is. Some are worth thousands of dollars, and can be sold for that much to willing buyers.

A site like CS:GO Lotto adds a gambling aspect, where players throw their skins in a pot, spin a wheel and the winner takes them all. It can get more complicated than that, but those are the basics. The result is a betting industry across a network of sites which generates millions, some even say billions, in revenue. Given that there are no regulations for it, the site lets Steam users as young as 13 participate.

Given that online fantasy sports betting is only just now catching the eye of legislators, it’s unclear what, if anything will be done about sites like this which skirt traditional gambling rules and even allow underage participants, despite enormous sums of money being on the line.

At least one Counter-Strike player has filed suit against Valve itself for being complacent in all this. The suit says that Valve “knowingly allowed ... and has been complicit in creating, sustaining and facilitating [a] market" where players use skins essentially as stand-ins for casino chips.

The idea is that Valve benefits greatly from this gambling industry, as it results in a massive outpouring of players (and even non-players) buying skins legally from them to be gambled on these third party websites. Some also speculate that CS:GO gambling results in much higher viewership for eSports matches, given how much is put on the line for the results of various matches.

There are really two different issues at play here, one is about YouTuber disclosure, and the other the legality of the gambling scene itself. For YouTubers, disclosure issues frequently plague the community, but it’s important not to paint everyone with a broad brush. Most responsible YouTubers either don’t do paid content at all, or if they do, they’re very clear about disclosing it. But in this case, it’s not just that these players weren’t disclosing behind the scenes deals, which would be bad enough, it’s that they actually owned what they were promoting. A YouTuber like Cassel who runs a channel with 9+ million subscribers wields an enormous amount of power, which has clearly been abused in this case. Strangely, if he had simply disclosed his stake in CS:GO Lotto in the first place, he likely still would have driven loads of traffic to it because of his influence, yet avoided this recent controversy.

It’s hard to fathom anything even close to this happening in the print/online industry. This isn’t even just a company paying for a paid post that wasn’t disclosed (which would be really, really bad itself for any publication), this would be like if a journalist suddenly came out and said that not only did CDProjekt Red pay them to write glowing articles about The Witcher 3, but they had actually been part-owner of the studio itself the entire time. That’s not a perfect analogy, but that’s nearly how crazy this situation is.

As for Valve’s part, until there’s some sort of regulation to make them care, they seem perfectly content with CS:GO turning into a casino game, as players gamble with skins and Valve gets to rake in money from legal purchases of the microtransactions. It seemed, briefly, that Valve was taking some sort of stand against this by blocking CS:GO Lotto links, but later that was revealed to have been an accident, and Valve has not returned request for comment about this controversy as a whole.

It’s unclear what happens next, as this story is currently unfolding. Even if Martin and Cassel and others are outed for their role in promoting their own interests, the CS:GO gambling scene is too large and too profitable to simply dissolve.

I have reached out to the YouTubers, YouTube itself and Valve for comment, and will update if I hear back.